During the 19th Century waves of
immigrants flocked to America for refuge from war, political oppression,
religious persecution, and famine. They came seeking freedom of action, the
opportunity to acquire land and employment, and the sense of security engendered
by a new continent's boundless natural riches and booming economy. Over the last
100 years, the dream of freedom, opportunity and security has circled the globe
and ignited the aspirations of people everywhere. Soaring expectations have
driven ever higher the standards by which humanity assesses it rights,
opportunities and secure possessions. The measures by which the social
collective conceives its responsibilities to individual citizens have risen
correspondingly.

This relentless quest continues today as legal and
illegal migration of the skilled and unskilled across international boundaries
and in the magnetic attraction of rural families to urban life. It is a
compelling force for the spread of democracy and the accelerated development of
productive capacities around the world. Where it has been too violently
suppressed or given insufficient scope for expression, the resulting frustration
is a catalyst for violence and revolution. Peace, opportunities for gainful
employment, and food security are the key variables in the formula for social
stability and prosperity. Whether by a revolutionary individual effort or an
evolutionary general progress, the process continues undeterred.

The quest for food security
springs from this movement. During the age of Malthus, hunger was conceived
primarily as a problem of insufficient food production. While the world’s
population has increased nearly six-fold during the past two centuries, the
capacity to produce food has grown even faster. Since 1950 world food production
has tripled. Today the world possesses the capacity to produce more than
sufficient food to feed its burgeoning population. But mere production of more
food is not sufficient to eradicate hunger. In most countries access to gainful
employment is now the single greatest challenge to achieving food security. Even
in the most prosperous nations, employment opportunities and income security are
subject to market forces and cannot be considered a source of absolute security.
Unless the right to food is legally enshrined and enforced, the specter of
insecurity will remain. This realization has recently prompted the Government of
India to propose the bold and unprecedented legislation to guarantee access to
gainful employment for the poorest sections of the population that are most
susceptible to hunger.

The recent Tsunami that devastated South Asia on
December 26th leaving five million homeless and three million without
food illustrates the challenge. In a heartbeat fertile farm lands were washed
away in the flood. Entire fishing villages that had been producers of food for
other families were suddenly bereft of the capacity to feed themselves. The
inability of society to mobilize and distribute sufficient food during times of
national calamity can deprive even the relatively well-to-do of true food
security.

There is a great distance between granting
individuals freedom to exercise their own capacities, creating opportunities for
them to fulfill their aspirations, and ensuring to them the means to securely
possess and enjoy what they have thus acquired. Freedom implies a permissive
atmosphere supported by laws and an organized capacity for enforcement.
Opportunity implies an expansive and creative environment supported by an
efficient organization of productive activities. Security implies protection of
that which has been acquired supported by an organization for emergency relief
in the face of any contingency.

True food security is not
just a state of capacity for production or economic where-with-all to purchase.
It is in essence a psychological state of confidence in which the very
possibility of deprivation has been removed. Such a state is difficult to
conceive in the world today, but that does not mean it is unachievable. There is
a certain irony in the fact that most societies compel their citizens to become
educated while still leaving them largely responsible for fulfilling more basic
human needs such as food, housing and employment, without which the capacity to
acquire education, indeed even to survive, are placed in question.

This evolutionary advance,
while highly commendable on humanitarian grounds, has been propelled by the
practical consideration that the greater the number who attain rights and
benefits, the stronger, more resilient and successful the society becomes. The
converse principle, as illustrated by the Great Crash of 1929, is that the
unwillingness or failure to push benefits down obstructs and ultimately destroys
the potential for greater advancement among those at the top. The same principle
that has led governments to ensure bank deposits against the errors and
malpractices of bankers, compels us to extend the security umbrella to encompass
all the most precious achievements of modern society.

Nor can any country safely confine its interest to
within its own borders. In today’s world, violence, hunger, unemployment,
disease and pollution know no boundaries. Unemployment begets hunger and hunger
begets violence that can spill over and touch the lives of people anywhere. Of
the 104 new conflicts that have broken out around the world since the end of the
Cold War, most are concentrated in regions heavily dependent on agriculture.
Very few have occurred in food-secure environments, but their consequences
threaten security throughout the world. No one can be fully secure unless and
until everyone has obtained a modicum of security, both physically and
psychologically.

Organization holds the key to global food security.
The present, unorganized functioning of global agriculture, like the present
global approach to military security, engenders insecurity and generates new
threats by the very act of trying to eliminate existing ones. Nations today live
in a competitive security system, wherein each nation is largely responsible for
its own defense and the very act of strengthening its capacity for defense
increases the real or perceived threats and insecurity of other nations.
Similarly, the competitive food security system results in wasteful
overproduction, unremunerative prices and unsustainable subsidies. A cooperative
security system would be one that by including all nations would eliminate
potential threats to all its members at the lowest possible cost.

A cooperative organization for food security needs
to be put in place at all levels – local, national and international. It is only
through such a mechanism as an international food corporation that the huge
overproduction of food crops within and between countries that result in
collapsing market prices, farmer bankruptcies and huge subsidies can be avoided.
It is only through better organization internationally that the need for
maintaining costly national buffer stocks can be minimized through creation of
an international buffer stock and food security system. It is only through
improved organization that the huge waste of food due to poor storage and
handling – estimated at 20 percent of agricultural GDP in India – can be
eliminated. As the international organization of credit card
transactions—involving thousands of banks, millions of companies, hundreds of
millions of individual users, and trillion dollars of business—provides accurate
and instantaneous exchange of information on credit transactions, an
international food organization would have to provide accurate, up-to-the-minute
information on supply and demand for food worldwide together with a fool proof
system for rapid transfer of resources wherever and whenever they are required.

An international organization for food security will
not eliminate healthy competition. Indeed, it will foster it. In the case of
bank credit cards, organizations such as Visa International both promote and
secure cooperative competition among thousands of banks, while minimizing the
risks to all parties. But it will provide all players with access to the
essential information required to make intelligent decisions regarding what and
how much food to produce to meet projected demand nationally and globally. It
will substantially reduce the risks of agriculture as a business, thereby
encouraging banks and insurance companies to extend the credit and insurance
coverage needed to protect producers, while ensuring stable supplies and prices
for consumers. An effective organization for food security will necessarily
require the opening of markets and elimination of export subsidies by
industrialized nations.

Global food security requires the capacity to
produce a physical abundance of food; the capacity to create a responsive
organization to link production, distribution and consumption; the capacity to
create an integrated communications network for information and transactions;
and the capacity for legal enforcement. The world possesses all these capacities
at the present moment. But to achieve world food security, they must be founded
on and driven by the global recognition of food security as a fundamental and
inviolable human right and the enshrinement of that right in law and treaty.

The world community possesses the technological,
financial, organizational and human capabilities required to eradicate world
hunger and assure a modicum of real food security to its entire population
within a decade. It is not a matter of charity or aid. As in the case of
universal education, it is a question of ensuring to all citizens the essential
requirements for self-reliance and self-development. It requires a shift in
emphasis from managing food to developing human beings. It requires the will and
determination to accelerate the natural progression of human development that
has so dramatically enhanced human security for so many over the past 50 years
and must inevitably tackle this issue which is so essential to the future peace
and stability of the whole world.

Garry Jacobs is a
business and development consultant; Vice-President, MSS Research, India; and Executive Director, International Center for
Peace & Development, USA.